O Googlers, where art thou? / Some employees found instant riches in the Internet search company's initial public offering -- affording them the luxury of pursuing new dreams

Verne Kopytoff, Chronicle Staff Writer

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4:00 am PST, Sunday, January 7, 2007

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Will Whitted designed and built part of a beautiful dining room table and a light fixture overhead in the living room of his Woodside home.
Will Whitted left Google about 18 months ago. He enjoys designing furniture and the living spaces in his home in Woodside.
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Will Whitted designed and built part of a beautiful dining room table and a light fixture overhead in the living room of his Woodside home.
Will Whitted left Google about 18 months ago. He ... more

Photo: Brant Ward

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Will Whitted designed and built part of a beautiful dining room table and a light fixture overhead in the living room of his Woodside home.
Will Whitted left Google about 18 months ago. He enjoys designing furniture and the living spaces in his home in Woodside.
{Brant Ward/San Francisco Chronicle}11/30/06 less

google03064.JPG
Will Whitted designed and built part of a beautiful dining room table and a light fixture overhead in the living room of his Woodside home.
Will Whitted left Google about 18 months ago. He ... more

Photo: Brant Ward

O Googlers, where art thou? / Some employees found instant riches in the Internet search company's initial public offering -- affording them the luxury of pursuing new dreams

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Who in their right mind would leave a job at Google Inc., a company legendary for pampering workers with free annual ski trips and gourmet food?

Well, it turns out plenty of people do. And many of them are some of the Web giant's earliest employees.

Extremely wealthy from stock options that soared in value, 100 of Google's first 300 workers have quietly resigned to go to law school, help poor shopkeepers get loans or simply to live the good life. Although hardly a mass exodus, the numbers are adding up, scattering what some employees considered their second families.

For Google, the departures present a new hurdle. Enticing as many old-timers to stay as possible is a priority because, with each farewell party, a piece of the company's institutional knowledge and culture is lost.

"We take a lot of time and care, in particular with our old-timers," said Stacy Sullivan, Google's human resources director. "It's so important that we are paying attention to whether they're being challenged."

What's happened to Google following its blockbuster initial public offering in 2004 echoes several of technology's other titans, such as Yahoo Inc., eBay Inc. and Microsoft Corp. But because of Google's celebrity and generous perks, the question remained whether the pattern would play out again.

Google's initial public offering immediately minted more than 900 millionaires at the company, by one estimate. Even many rank-and-file employees became instantly wealthy. The total has grown over time as its shares have catapulted in value.

Financial freedom gave the former Googlers in this article wide latitude in deciding what to do with their lives. The reasons for leaving are many: Alack of new challenges, ambivalence about the company's growth and a desire for a career change are just a few.

But virtually all of the former Googlers fondly recall helping build what is now the most popular search engine, particular during the early years when they felt like they had a big impact and employees knew all their colleagues' names. Those cheery memories, however, are mixed with flashbacks of late nights at the office, spending Valentine's dinner in the company cafeteria and strife.

The chef

Google's employees didn't know it, but they were Charlie Ayers' guinea pigs. As Google's chef, he used the company cafeteria to experiment with flavors and ingredients -- a little royal jelly here and a little wheatgrass there -- to feed the search engine's army.

This year, he hopes to capitalize on his geek-tested recipes by opening Calafia Café, a Palo Alto restaurant specializing in organic, local foods.

Ayers, who joined Google as employee No. 53 in 1999, relished his early days there, calling it "probably the most fabulous, most fascinating place to work: everyone had one ambition and goal; everyone wanted to make it the most successful company."

In the kitchen, Ayers said, he was accorded the same free rein as an engineer working on software as he developed signature dishes like mahogany salmon and Elvis fried chicken to spice up the menu in the now-famous free cafeteria for employees. But as Google grew, the spontaneity evolved into a bureaucracy of budgets and organizational charts that highlighted the chasm between executives and foot soldiers, he said.

"I could see the tides were turning," recalled Ayers. "There were more suits starting to fill the hallways."

Before leaving Google in 2005, Ayers said, he spent a lot of sleepless nights pondering his future. But he figured that the time was right, so in between vacationing and buying a house in San Carlos equipped with a professional kitchen, he raised $2 million for his restaurant from mostly former Google colleagues.

When not working on his restaurant, Ayers consults with companies about operating corporate cafeterias and writes a cookbook due out this year. He says he's busier than ever.

Not that that's the case with all former Googlers, some of whom are living lifestyles of the rich and famous funded by stock windfalls. He jokingly called some of them his "deadbeat millionaire friends."

"They say, 'Oh, come fishing with us in Cancun or skydiving in South Africa,' " Ayers recalled. "They take races around the world like the Cannonball rally where the finish line is the Playboy mansion."

The humanitarian

At Google, Olana Khan rubbed shoulders with billionaires. In her new job, she helps people for whom a few hundred dollars is a fortune.

Khan, 31, left her job overseeing a part of Google's global sales to become chief operating officer of Kiva.org, a San Francisco nonprofit that funnels small loans to budding entrepreneurs in developing nations such as Uganda and Ecuador. Unlike Google, where the sky's the limit, the entrepreneurs Kiva helps simply want enough money to put a roof over their taco cart or stock their beauty salon.

While in college, Khan dreamed of a noble career in nonprofit work, but after graduation gravitated to tech jobs to pay off student loans.

During her six years at Google, Khan had four jobs, and at one point, had 55 people working under her in what she described as an intense, exhausting environment.

For one Valentine's dinner, she and her soon-to-be husband, Zain, another early Googler, rendezvoused in the cafeteria after lingering too late at their desks. Laptop computers had to be banned from the bedroom.

For a year prior to leaving, Khan anguished about making the leap, worried that she would never be able to top her accomplishments. That she had earned a windfall at Google -- and therefore didn't have to make a financial sacrifice to join the nonprofit for $250 in monthly salary -- made the decision easier.

"For me, it's like finishing what I wanted to start, and Google let it happen," Khan said.

Following her departure in August, Khan found herself out of the loop for juicy Google secrets such as new products in the works and dates others would be released. Initially, to ease the transition, Khan avoided the Google campus and its gossip.

Kiva is devoid of the creature comforts Khan enjoyed at Google. Furnishings are a mix of donated desks and chairs.

"It's more of a challenge than Google ever was," Khan said. "I worry that we can't meet our payroll. I have more stress on a nightly basis going to bed with Kiva than it ever was with Google."

The homebody

Every day is like Saturday for Will Whitted.

Since retiring from Google in 2005, he's been a man of leisure, starting his mornings with a spin on his exercise bike, then answering e-mail followed by a trip to his cluttered garage to hammer out his latest inspiration in home decor.

Or maybe not.

"For the first time in my life, I don't have to get approval for anything I do," Whitted said.

Who can blame him? Whitted, 59, is unabashedly living the good life in his posh, secluded Woodside home with views of a neighbor's vineyard and a plowed-under lawn he hopes to restore to native grassland.

Google, where he worked for five years in electrical engineering, is a distant memory. His decision to leave came soon after his diagnosis with lymphoma, although he added that "people had stopped listening to me" anyway.

"I loved it and hated it," Whitted said of his time there.

Whitted, who helped design several generations of Google's servers, said the company was increasingly bogged down by its size. Conservatism was creeping in.

One of the ideas he championed was to build portable data centers in cargo containers, a project Google tested in its headquarters parking lot. But managers were too timid to pack in enough servers, so the experiment was not cost-effective and was ultimately canceled, he said.

"Instead of inspiration-based design, it became fear-based design," Whitted said.

In the early days, Google was a magnet for brainiacs, Whitted recalled. He loved the company's quirky style and corporate philosophy -- "Don't be evil" -- which was invoked occasionally, he said.

"I sat at many meetings where someone said, 'This is evil' for this reason and that," Whitted said. "And people would listen."

These days, Whitted spends time outfitting his home to his iconoclastic tastes, designing everything from light fixtures made from tubing to a giant shag rug for his spacious living room. Eco-friendliness is key.

The dining room table he created has metal legs filled with 500 pounds of water. It helps moderate the room's temperature and save on energy, he explained while sitting under a chandelier he also crafted.

When not in his workshop, Whitted advises students at Stanford University, donates equipment to a local city college and mulls over his ideas for alternative energy.

On retirement, Whitted said: "It's what I should have been doing all along."

The angel

Taking a job at Google six years ago, when the company was just another money-losing startup, paid off handsomely for Aydin Senkut.

But does he have the nose to sniff out success once again, this time as an angel investor? Senkut, 37, is hoping so, as are many former Googlers who similarly dole out seed money to foster entrepreneurs and their ideas.

Senkut's new career came after deciding that new challenges were too few and far between at Google, where he last worked as a senior manager for Asia Pacific. He had helped introduce Google's first 10 international Web sites and forged partnerships with companies across the globe, but he wanted something more.

Too often, Senkut said, he had missed out on family birthdays and Christmas holidays while he was sitting in an airplane or at his desk.

"When you have this financial freedom, it makes you view your priorities differently," Senkut said.

Initially, after resigning from Google in 2005, Senkut was undecided about what he wanted to do other than to splurge on what he considered to be a big luxury: time off. He took his mother to Paris for her 60th birthday, attended the Cannes Film Festival and watched the Wimbledon finals from center court.

Then his future slowly came into focus during visits to a gym in Palo Alto. Gym mates would ask Senkut to take a look at this or that startup, until it ramped up to the point where he was getting calls from companies about investing in and advising them.

Through Felicis Ventures, the investment company he now runs out of his Atherton home, Senkut has backed 17 mostly consumer-oriented Internet start-ups, an industry he knows well. On average, he invests $50,000, usually alongside other angels.

Senkut's advice, learned during his tenure at Google, is the following: "Never take the existing norm or the status quo. Always look for a better way. Treat people nicely."

The entrepreneur

For Dan Daugherty, opening Google's Denver office was like creating a startup inside a start-up. He and his only colleague at the time had to do everything: order printers, hire staff and arrange for massages, a traditional Google perk.

Now, the 28-year-old is using that experience to build his own company, Rent Marketer, a service for landlords to post available rentals on several Web sites.

To satisfy his entrepreneurial drive, Daugherty left his job as Google's sales and operations manager in 2005. Being the boss meant giving up a comfortable job and risking his own money.

"Entrepreneurship is at my core," Daugherty said.

His tenure at Google began in 2002, later than most of the other former Googlers in this article. And he is a rare breed among the post-Google crowd: For whatever reason, few have gone on to create startups.

Daugherty's startup germinated as he amassed millions of dollars worth of Denver rental properties, a portfolio he began building shortly after moving there for Google.

In his new venture, Daugherty said he plans to use several lessons learned at Google such as keeping product development teams small and making quick decisions. For now, he has little alternative: Rent Marketer has only nine employees.

The jack-of-all-trades

During Google's early years, David desJardins, an engineer, felt like he played a critical role at the company.

"As one of 20 people, I was making a big difference," he said. "If I didn't show up, things would crash."

But after Google's staff ballooned into the thousands, desJardins, 43, realized the company's success was no longer on his shoulders. To make a bigger impact, he would have to become a manager or a specialist -- career paths for which the jack-of-all-trades had no appetite.

After taking unpaid time off, desJardins resigned in 2005 following six years at Google.

These days, desJardins, wears many hats, none full time. He invests in startups, evangelizes other Googlers on the merits of philanthropy, consults for a Defense Department-sponsored think tank that specializes in encrypted communication, and is the world's top-ranked player of Titan, a board game featuring armies of mythological beasts.

All the while, he's remodeling his home in Burlingame and working with an architect to build a second one.

Initially, desJardins' time off was consumed with the complexities of managing his financial bounty, including tax planning and setting up a plan for charitable giving (he and his wife created a $20 million fund within the Silicon Valley Community Foundation). He also put money into a few startups, keeping the amounts small and the risk low while learning the ropes of angel investing.

DesJardins, who has a doctorate in math, joined Google after a friend at AOL's Netscape division suggested the company to him, saying it seemed to be an interesting place. He accepted the firm's offer a day after interviewing, figuring he'd try it out for a year.

Then the hard work started.

"There were so many ways that were obvious that things could be better," desJardins said of the original software that Google ran on. "From the inside, you could see so many things that were cobbled together -- so many compromises."

In the end, though, he's sure of one thing about joining Google. "It turned out to be a pretty good decision."

The student

To grow up, Ron Dolin felt he needed to make a big change. After six years as an engineer at Google, the 45-year-old enrolled in law school, where earning a degree would depend on hard work and propel him into adulthood.

"People think I'm crazy," said Dolin, who already has a doctorate in computer science. "Making the decision wasn't difficult. I have a lot harder time ordering dinner than actually deciding what I want to do with my life."

Granted, Dolin said his chances for promotion at Google were limited because, as he put it, there were many more capable software engineers.

To Dolin, working at Google was thrilling. Beginning in 2000, he got a fly-on-wall view of the company's rise to global phenomenon.

"It's really fun to work on something when you know that it's going to impact millions and millions of people," Dolin said. "Google is the biggest, most unimaginable playground to work in."

In the early days, the ideas of every employee were considered important. Anyone could chime in about a new product's design and be taken seriously.

Over time, Google's democracy faded, he said. The feeling of ownership among employees, a natural when a company has 100 workers, was nearly impossible to maintain after the workforce grew into the thousands.

"The culture can leak a bit," Dolin said.

Much like he did at Google, Dolin said he sometimes pulls all-nighters at UC Hastings College of the Law. He hopes to specialize in intellectual property law after graduating in 2009.

Dolin whetted his appetite for law at Google, where he helped develop policy for doing business in China and made sure the company complied with U.S. securities regulations. Although hired to improve the quality of search results, he ultimately worked on a range of problems, and he thinks that a law career may be just as varied.

"The inevitability of people moving on is very natural," Dolin said. "Google has been such an enabler of opportunities -- so many exciting opportunities."